


Conversations with Dead People

by misslonelyhearts



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Death, Forgiveness, Gen, Late Night Conversations, buffy homage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-30
Updated: 2017-01-30
Packaged: 2018-09-20 23:27:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9520766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misslonelyhearts/pseuds/misslonelyhearts





	

  
I.    
  
  
Hawke had every intention to sleep, she really did, but Skyhold’s rooms were cold, its people restless and wary.  And, as would apparently be her habit until the day she died, Hawke’s intentions fell short.    
  
She hadn’t been sleeping the way dogs don’t sleep when they’re anxious, how their curled bodies seem content, but their ears never soften and their noses go on twitching.  So she only half-noticed when the boy slipped in.  His feet made no sound, and his hands on the window were quiet as a ghost’s.   
  
If it hadn’t been for the huge ugly hat he mightn’t have breached the candlelight at all.  At the foot of her bed, he noticed her noticing.  Hawke’s heart thrashed inside her chest.   
  
From under the hat, a feather-light voice murmured, “Mother didn’t say it the right way, soot in her red eyes. And he tried, too, the younger getting older, getting armor, fading blue. Their faces were true, still you didn’t believe them.”   
  
Hawke frowned.  This was to be a visitation of portent, then, not combat.  Neither option appealed, but at least her nightclothes were appropriate for the former. She relaxed her death grip on the edge of the blanket and rubbed her face.   
  
“Pardon? Who’s got the wrong faces?”    
  
Somehow, though she was tired and travel-worn and discomfited by Skyhold’s walls, she had no fear of the boy under the hat.  He had a peculiar quirk to his head, a chicken’s curiosity.  It disarmed her.   
  
The tilt of the hat deepened, the voice under it more solid as it proclaimed, “You’re Hawke.”   
  
“That’s what it says on the statue, yeah,” she replied, exhaling. “And if we’re talking about faces being wrong-”   
  
“Not wrong,” he snipped back, then softly again, “but you were. They said what you needed, but there was blood in your ears.”   
  
Hawke blinked at him.  Her legs were curled under the blankets, her staff leaning in the space between nightstand and wall, but she felt no urge to act.  He said nothing threatening, made no move for a weapon, but there came a tender bombardment anyway, simply from his presence.  Tiny bees, their stingers sharp with memory, stung Hawke’s eyes.     
  
Pain took up shapes in her mind, places, moments and their familial faces made watercolor splashes, plipping one upon the other, bleeding soft color, softer than the wretched city had any right to appear, until it no longer hurt think of them as they’d been: whittled to the bone by loss and still able to hold her, to love her, and say she was enough.  The whole of the picture--painted, she suspected, by the bearer of the hat--transformed the condemnation she’d always assumed into something like comfort.  Like peace.   
  
Again she exhaled, the sweetness faded, and the dreary borrowed room returned around her.  The boy tilted his head back and she saw his ashen face.   
  
“You’d be Cole, then,” she said, nodding, swiping at her cheeks where she could’ve sworn there were tears.   
  
“Would be, yes.  Have been.” He stepped back against a table and then hopped upon it, legs dangling over the darkness.  “I am sorry, I startled you, disturbed you.  I don’t sleep much.  Forget that I can.”   
  
“Maybe it’s the hat.”   
  
“I don’t think so.”   
  
“Are you. . .Can you talk to the dead?”   
  
“No. Can you?”   
  
“Not yet,” Hawke said, and huffed a small laugh.   
  
“You want to.  Questions, not demands, you think they have answers,” said Cole. “They don’t.”   
  
Hawke pushed herself up against the headboard, hands drifting to loose knots in her lap.   
  
“From what I’ve heard, you haven’t been in the world very long.  Let me tell you, we’re quite stubborn, and remarkably idiotic about what we believe.”   
  
Cole’s legs ceased their vigorous swinging, teasing the cold air more like the feet of a hanged man.   
  
“It’s not wrong to want to know.  Suffer less.  I’ve been here long enough for guessing, grappling, grabbing fragments.  But, I’m not as good at that as the other.”  The hat tilted up again, revealing watery eyes shot through with managed pain. “If it’ll help, I can guess the answer, say it right, so you’ll believe.”   
  
“A strange boy in fantastic headwear offering me kind words in the middle of the night?” Hawke shrugged.  Tears prickled again.  She looked at her hands as she lied.  “It couldn’t hurt.”   
  
He didn’t have to touch her.  Hawke had been advised about him, assured that Cole did what he did from a careful distance, so much so that many at Skyhold still believed him a ghost.  If they saw him at all.  But it wasn’t a ghost that hopped down from the table, came to sit cross-legged on the bed like a lost baby brother, and took her hand.   
  
Like his speech, his skin was neither warm nor cold.  He was real, more or less.  And, Hawke thought dryly, the sort of presence likely to be a comfort only to the odd, the agonized, and the irretrievable.   
  
Was it any wonder she felt so at home in the shadow of that hat?    
  
“The answer is yes,” he said.  “You did everything you could.  You always do.”   
  
  
  
II.   
  
  
The topmost door in the tower squalled horribly when he opened it, and Blackwall wondered how many people he’d woken with the sound.  But the mingled stink of birdshit and incense flowed through immediately, strong and demanding, and he forgot about the late hour in the wake of that smell.  He nearly took a step back.  It wasn’t any worse than horse muck and wood rot, though, and his instinct to be particular had buggered off long ago.   
  
He entered the dim room.  Across the semi-circle of her office, Leliana stood at a shrine to Andraste, her back to him, a long, thin match in her hand as she lit one candle after another.     
  
“Sorry to disturb you at this hour, uh. . . I’m not sure what title to call you by.”     
  
She blew out the match and turned around.  Her hood was down, revealing bright ginger hair that Blackwall had never seen before.  While a bit of curiosity tugged at her face, she said nothing, just dropped the charred match into a brass pot under the shrine.   
  
“Anyway, I found this book in the barn,” he said, remembering why he’d come up to the shit-spackled tower in the first place.   
  
“Oh?”  She glided to her table when he approached on the opposite side, and looked down at the cover as he held it out for her.  A single eyebrow arched, but she didn’t take it to examine it further.   
  
“ _ The Yellow Grove _ ,” she read, and appeared to think on it. “It’s about a chevalier who finds a secret world.  I’ve never seen a version in Common, though.”   
  
“Fancied someone had left me a bit of reading material out of kindness,” offered Blackwall.  He cracked the book open, thumbing the pages to a flutter. “But it’s a damned odd story, if I’m honest, and I don’t reckon a person who knew me would think it my taste.”   
  
She sighed and said, “Then it was left by someone who did not know you at all,” before sitting down at her desk.  Leliana gazed at the rotunda, where dozens of cages hung at odd lengths in the dusty moonlight, like musical notes.     
  
Blackwall thought what came out them was anything but.   
  
He’d been this close to Leliana only once before, just after his arrival at Haven.  Then, he couldn’t have guessed her age or her position or placed anything about her but the accent.  And that could be false, he knew.  But here in the tower, treading the murk and the stench, where even Andraste’s grace seemed to struggle with the cold, Leliana looked more a person than Blackwall had ever seen.  Not a pitiless phantom or a legend, but an overworked woman.  The shrine’s quavering candles battled with the darkness of the tower, and between them Leliana looked worn out.     
  
He’d wanted to leave the moment he stepped in her space.  Now, she seemed to want the same, and he couldn’t make himself oblige.  So, he looked down at the book in his hands.   
  
“It doesn’t belong in the library, or anywhere else around this bloody fortress.  I’ve checked.”   
  
“How terrible, to be so out of place,” she said mildly, her hands folded over sheaves of parchment.   
  
“You were my last hope to find it a proper home, but. . . .” Blackwall’s attempt to cobble a conversation faltered. “Why do you look at me like that?”     
  
“Like what?”   
  
“Like I kicked your favorite nug.”   
  
Leliana snorted and sat back in her chair, sagging as she looked not at Blackwall but at the book he held.   
  
“Perhaps it’s the Warden in you,” she said, gesturing at him with a tired wave of her hand.  “Even without the armor, you remind me of one I knew.”   
  
“Not an inspiring figure, I take it?”   
  
“A friend.  They cut the deepest, you know, leave the nastiest scars.”  Her hand drifted down to a plain wooden box with a silver key plate, nearly engulfed by the missives that were piled on top.   
  
“This Warden made the mistake of, what, attacking  _ you _ ?”  Disbelieving, Blackwall imagined Leliana engaged in everything from a fist-fight to a twilight assassination on the unknown Warden.  “Must’ve paid dearly.”   
  
She looked saddened by the memory, however, not bitter or enraged as he would’ve been.   
  
“She did what was necessary.  I understand that now.”   
  
He nodded down at her, meeting her eyes for the first time since opening the door, and found their warmth damned confusing.  The blaze of faith, he assumed.  But under it lay a chill, as if she expected something more of him.   
  
Blackwall cleared his throat.   
  
“I don’t apologize for the sins of others, but you seem to, er, have that effect on lots of people ‘round here.”  His crack at a knowing smile earned him nothing from her.  “At any rate, I’m a reminder, one you can’t avoid, and for that I am truly sorry.  Sorry she hurt you.”   
  
Leliana shook her head, surprising him, and leaned forward into the circle of lamplight that covered her desk.   
  
“Don’t be.  In many ways, everything I am I owe to her.  Her betrayal was a gift, a treasure hewn from difficulty, softened by time.”   
  
He huffed.  “Some gift.”   
  
“Perspective is always painful,” she replied, eyes direct and blazing again, again making hot and cold run under his skin.  “If it were not, what would it be worth?”   
  
She marked the question doubly by letting her gaze flick to the book, which kept its place under his elbow.  A story within a story.   
  
It belonged exactly nowhere, and wasn’t anything to anyone but him.  Blackwall briefly considered burning the thing, then forced himself to hide, to cage up all the bloodless, soulless reasons that explained his fear of a simple book.  Or a conversation.   
  
“Well, I should be lucky to receive it, one day,” he said, not recognizing his own nerve-roughened voice.    
  
Then, he gave Leliana an abbreviated bow, and couldn’t quit the room fast enough.    
  
“Lucky.  Yes.”  Her voice carried across the dark tower, low, sweet, and strangely barbed. “And who will you be when it arrives?”   
  
He was halfway through the door before he stopped, quelling the shiver that came from squeaking hinges and the cackling reply of ravens.  Blackwall turned to see Leliana staring at him, through him, like a cat blinking at ghost in the corner.   
  
“Hopefully not the nug-kicker,” he said, and shut the door on that queer, empty look.   
  
  
  
III.   
  
  
At a dark hour between midnight and dawn, a tall figure shambled into Skyhold’s main hall.  A flank of Inquisition guards trailed after him, halberds readied.  Either he didn’t notice them or didn’t care, just kept one armored foot scraping after the other.  He passed Varric at the fireplace, passed the long tables and the sleepy servants, and went on walking toward the empty throne.     
  
A corpse, single-minded and unaware, that’s what it looked like to Varric.  Like the dozens they’d hacked down in the Mire.  So, how’d it get past the guards? And why weren’t they jabbing it like moldy hay?     
  
Varric dragged the spectacles off his nose, dropped his book on the table, and joined the two guards that were still following the shambling man at a distance.   
  
At four paces, Varric spied the dull glint and tattered blue of Warden armor.  There was an empty greatsword sling strapped across the man’s back, and something needled Varric’s mind about the hanks of dark hair, the cowlick. . .    
  
He put out a hand to stop the guards.   
  
“Junior?” he said, voice shaking.    
  
The figure shuddered to a halt, turned, and managed not to sway too badly.     
  
Upon seeing Varric between the two guards, the man exhaled, dropped his shoulders in relief, and muttered through a painful smile, “Do me a favor and don’t put that on my urn, you prick.”   
  
Varric winced, both from the sight of Carver and from an equal pain in the center of his chest.  His fist, he realized, was pressed there.  He released it, and his breath, too, and waved the guards off.   
  
Carver’s eyes moved across them as they went, chips of used coal that eventually tumbled onto Varric again.   
  
“Well, you’ve looked better,” said Varric.   
  
Carver grinned.  Mossy teeth emerged between chapped lips.   
  
“I’m. . .I’ve been walking.  Couldn’t stop,” he replied, avoiding Varric’s appraisal while he stretched his back.  “Bastards never said there’d be so much walking in the end.”   
  
Houses on fire looked better.  Week-old mutton in the rain looked better.  A sunken greyness rooted itself along Carver’s cheeks, his forehead, under the patchy beard.  Briefly, harshly, Varric thought a dance with a pair of halberds looked better than what was reaching for Carver with both hands.   
  
“That what this is?  The long walk?”  Varric came alongside Carver and. . .couldn’t bring himself to hug him, or even shake his hand.  Instead, he gestured down the hall to his table by the fire.   
  
“Think so, yeah.”  Slowly, Carver moved where he was told.   
  
“Still getting ahead of yourself,” Varric mumbled, falling into step beside him.  He shook his head.  “What you’re feeling is a pissed-off dead magister pulling your strings.  It isn’t real.”   
  
“Tell that to my feet,” Carver, shot back.  Then, his head snapped up like he’d been called.  He searched the high arches frantically, then went calm again when he found nothing but banners laced with cobwebs.  His throat bobbed as he mumbled,  “She around?”   
  
Varric couldn’t look at him, didn’t want to, and did it anyway.   
  
“It’s the middle of the night at the end of the world,” he said, swallowing. “Yeah, she’s here.”   
  
“Good.”  Carver nodded to himself and ambled toward the fireplace.  “Reckon I’ll enjoy one last talking-to.”   
  
Varric rolled his eyes.   
  
“Andraste’s ass, you’re not-”   
  
“Dead magister, eh?  We killed one of those,” Carver said, bemused, and dropped like a sack of steel scrap into the other chair at Varric’s table.   
  
“I’m working on a new definition of ‘kill’ these days,” Varric replied.     
  
Carver closed his eyes as he nodded, performing a wry old ritual of unbelieving acceptance that warmed Varric to recognize.   
  
Varric filled Hawke’s empty tankard, pushed it across the table to Carver, then topped off his own.   He peered into the raised cup and said, “Seems like we’re out of new stories to tell, Junior, so the world’s dusting off the old ones.  Resurrection’s the last refuge of a hack.”   
  
After he gulped deeply, Varric found Carver staring at the fire, his tankard untouched though his hand rested nearby.  If his armor ever fit him, it was a long time ago.  It laid on him for shape now, it used him instead of the other way around.  Varric figured there wasn’t a word, even among Wardens, for the depth of Carver’s exhaustion.  Blessedly, all the traces of illness that’d stood out at first were diminished by the firelight.  He didn’t seem young again, exactly, but it hurt Varric less to look at him.   
  
The Hawke he’d never met must’ve looked much like this in his last days, too.  Varric silently cursed his own imagination.   
  
“She’s gonna be happy to see you, kid,” he said.   
  
Carver’s eyes didn’t stray from the fire, didn’t seek the comforting face Varric hoped he was putting on.  But he did smirk a little, giving him a touch of the Kirkwall years.   
  
“First time for everything, even at the sodding end,” he said, the words rolling downhill from bitter to aching. “We never stay gone like we’re supposed to.”   
  
Varric grumbled, “Hmph.  Brothers,” and took another drink.


End file.
